How apt did Hervey find Isaiah – always wise, always certain.
‘I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.’
How little had Henrietta needed to adorn herself with jewels! He could see her before him now as plainly as he had that day in the chapel at Longleat. He could almost reach out to touch her, as he had that day, when he had found a warmth in her hand that spoke more than any words might. For the rest of the office he heard little, neither readings, nor prayers, nor psalms, nor the comings of the faithful nor the goings of the sightseers. Only the familiar words of St Chrysostom recalled him, beseeching Almighty God to fulfil ‘the desires and petitions of thy servants, as may be most expedient for them’. Desires and petitions – how he prayed for their fulfilment.
Afterwards, as they walked back to their lodgings, Elizabeth took careful note of her brother’s mien without, she hoped, giving him the impression of study. She concluded – she hoped not overhastily – that it spoke of something different in his heart. So it seemed, too, for he announced with uncommon brio that they would take their breakfast at the Caffè Greco.
And at that place, amid the greater than usual bustle of a Roman festival, Elizabeth observed that her brother was indeed a blither spirit. He took notice of what was about him, and in an approving way, whereas at times before, when he had not been sunk in introspection, he had seemed positively to despise the exuberance of the Greco’s less contemplative patrons.
‘Shall you go to your secret garden with Mr Shelley today?’ asked Elizabeth brightly. ‘Or does Commodore Peto command your attendance?’
Hervey returned her smile, but wider. ‘Mr Shelley is looking at new lodgings this morning, near the Spanish Steps. He asked me to accompany him but I told him he would better take a sapper than a dragoon. He will make up his own mind whatever it is that I say.’ He cut into a crostata, and none too neatly: sugar and crumbs spread about the table, so that Elizabeth began sweeping them together with a napkin, and a sisterly frown. ‘Commodore Peto wants to go and see the graves of some sailors. Apparently there was an affair on the Tiber a few years ago, when the Navy saved the Pope’s treasure from Bonaparte’s men, or something very like it.’
‘I should like to see them too,’ said Elizabeth decidedly. ‘May I come with you? Is it far?’
‘Testaccio, the other side of the Aventine. I thought we would walk since he wants also to see the Circus Maximus, though I told him it was nothing but a cow meadow.’
‘Then I shall dress for a country walk. It will be pleasant to spend a day out of the city. Do you not find the constant noise wearying?’
Hervey looked as though it was the first time he had considered the noise.
‘I quite confess to missing silence. I had a mind, indeed, to seek out a convent for a few days.’
Hervey brushed more sugar and crumbs from his coat as he finished the crostata. ‘That might be apt, for I had a mind to go to Naples for a few days. I should very much like to see Peto’s command. Would that disappoint you? You could join us there later. The duchess said she would see Naples, and would welcome your company.’
Elizabeth was, in truth, disappointed, but she readily understood that her brother’s return to full spirits needed the attention of a man under orders, and that she would break that peculiar fellowship if she travelled with them. Indeed, her withdrawal to a convent for a few days had been designed principally with that fellowship in mind. She nodded in agreement at her brother’s proposal. ‘I do not want to leave this country without seeing Pompeii and Vesuvius, though. But there is plenty of time, is there not? Did we not also speak of taking a ship from there to Sicily en route for home when the time came?’
‘We did, and we shall. Goethe says it is not possible to understand Italy without seeing Sicily. And I think we must discover why.’
Elizabeth smiled. ‘Then I shall get me to a nunnery. The duchess is bound to know which one is suitable.’
‘Ah,’ sighed her brother. ‘The duchess has very decided opinions, does she not?’
She did indeed, thought Elizabeth. And her decidedness, though admirable, had made of her an exile, though it was of her own choosing and she was surrounded by attentive company if not actual friends. And she was a widow, not an old maid, taking obvious comfort in her former state. But Elizabeth still shivered at the eternal image of the ageing, friendless and, as she thought, childless singleton, for it was a spectre that began visiting females such as she, respectable women ‘out’ in society beyond the usual time and still without a lace cap.
When they returned to their lodgings that evening, around six, Elizabeth was tired and said she would take her supper in. Hervey said he would be glad to keep her company, for Peto had told him there were three days overdue in his ‘log’, and he did not allow himself four. ‘And I suppose I must reply very soon to this,’ he sighed, taking a letter from the writing table. ‘A second from Lord Sussex in as many months. He writes that the regiment is certain for India next year. He asks me once again to take a troop.’
Elizabeth, her bonnet already off and her hand on the door to her rooms, hesitated only for an instant. ‘I believe you should.’
Hervey looked at her intently.
She narrowed her eyes just a little. ‘I believe you must.’
Hervey stood silent for the moment, seemingly astonished. ‘How can I possibly!’
‘How can you be here?’
‘That is hardly the same. There is a short end to Italy. India would be years. How can I abandon my own daughter?’
‘If you insist on the word “abandon”, brother, then I despair for you – and not much less for Georgiana. I have thought about it a very great deal these past weeks, and I am of the opinion that Georgiana’s best future will not be served by any cloying proximity of yours. I am sorry to speak so brutally, Matthew, but that is my opinion.’
Hervey had been for so many years in awe of his sister’s opinion that he at once checked the instinct to lash out against so hurtful a proposition.
Elizabeth did not want to lose the initiative. ‘There are three options, as I see them. And none requires that you are in attendance. Georgiana may remain at the vicarage, and we can find a governess when the time comes. Or else she can go to Longleat, or even to Chatsworth it seems, for the duchess suggested as much, did she not?’
‘I don’t recall that she—’
‘And the choice depends on what prospects you wish for Georgiana.’
Another option occurred to him, but he dismissed it at once as being the product of an entirely selfish impulse: if Elizabeth would accompany him to India with his daughter, then most of the objects would be accomplished. It was impossible, of course. Elizabeth could not leave their ageing parents, nor could any rightminded man submit his infant daughter to the trials of such a climate as India’s. ‘The only prospect I can rightfully own to is her health and happiness,’ he conceded.
‘We should all say “amen” to that, Matthew, but you must make a choice as to how best that is secured.’
Still Elizabeth remained with her hand to the door, as if she would not let him go without a decision. Hervey had not felt himself so tried in a long time. He knew he ought to have expected that Elizabeth would not let him off lightly. He had never flinched from decisions as a young cornet, nor lieutenant, nor even when first a captain. But his indecision in the affair of Lord Towcester had cost him very dearly. Had he grown indulgent?
‘I believe the air at Naples will do me good,’ he said suddenly, folding the letter and putting it in his pocket. ‘I think I shall take a walk and then call on Shelley. Shall I ask for collops for you?’
Elizabeth sighed. ‘Very well, brother. Perhaps a whiff of sulphur in Naples will be efficacious.’
Hervey looked at her, unsure
as to whether she intended any ambiguity. ‘And the collops?’
‘No, Matthew.’ She smiled. ‘I think that would be a little dull. I might as well be in Horningsham. I should like some macaroni and some red wine, and I shall sit with Miss Austen at hand. She is never dull.’
Hervey smiled back. He hoped profoundly he would never outlive his sister, for he could not imagine how he might subsist without her good sense. He kissed her forehead. ‘One day I shall read Miss Austen, since she has held both you and Henrietta in such thrall. But not just yet.’
*
‘I hope you won’t be so soon gone that you mayn’t see my new lodgings. They’re very pretty rooms.’
‘Near the Spanish Steps, you say?’
‘Ay. Not a stone’s throw from the Caffè Greco. I should be content to lodge there far longer than I have taken them.’
It was curious, thought Hervey, how Shelley rarely spoke but in the singular. Gossip in many a conversazione held there to be an uncommon alliance between Shelley, his wife and her stepsister. But Elizabeth had warned her brother that all was not happy with Mary, with whom she had become quite intimate. It was certainly not a matter that he and the poet might discuss. ‘You are intent on travelling north for the summer, I hear?’
Shelley raised his eyebrows a little. ‘It is not settled.’
‘Where might you go?’
‘Pisa, perhaps. Or Leghorn.’
‘But you would leave Rome altogether if you did?’
‘I should not keep the rooms, no.’
‘We might travel home by way of Leghorn.’
‘I wish that you would.’
They sipped Marsala for a while in silence.
‘The duchess is an engaging woman,’ said Hervey at length, almost by way of something to break the silence.
Shelley smiled. ‘Oh, engaging indeed. You did not know she was a Hervey?’
‘There was no reason to. I should be unable even to draw a design of our connection with her line.’
‘You thought her handsome, no doubt, too?’
‘Handsome indeed!’ replied Hervey readily.
‘Perhaps a little old for my taste.’ Shelley smiled again.
Hervey frowned in mock disapproval.
‘My dear friend!’ Shelley’s smile had turned indulgent. ‘I am only too glad to see that your impulses remain that of a man. The duchess has always exercised a powerful attraction.’
‘Well, very evidently it was so with the last duke, but—’
‘Hervey, she was his mistress for years, and of Lord knows how many other dukes. She has so many children salted about Europe that—’
‘Shelley, I really do not think that—’
‘And there was always talk of her association with Georgiana, the late duchess.’
‘Infamous! Shelley, you would do well not to repeat such things.’
But Shelley merely smiled the more. ‘Ah, but see what a woman such as she wrought of your demeanour this evening and last.’
Hervey relented, his smile broadening almost into laughter. ‘There is nothing about him that a good woman would not put right, and more so, even, a bad one!’
‘Vero! Vero! You see, Hervey, what a few months away from that hypocritical land of ours does for the spirits.’
Hervey nodded, but his smile was now one of some caution. ‘In the short run. But how may we know if it endures?’
‘Hervey, you exasperate me with that dogged faith of yours, for that’s what lies at the root of your melancholy. You know, when we walked around St Peter’s together, there was but one inscription that did not excite revulsion in me.’
‘Indeed?’ said Hervey, trying to sound surprised that Shelley had found even one.
‘Indeed. It was the memento mori above the entrance to the sacristy. But not for the reason it was placed there. Rather because it reminded that our prospects of pleasure are limited.’
Hervey looked at him intently. ‘And the rest is silence?’
‘Yes, Hervey. It is.’
Hervey sighed, seeming to weigh his words a good deal. ‘Shelley, I might wish it were so.’
CHAPTER FIVE
QUO VADIS?
Three days later
Despite the temptations, they stopped only once along the Via Appia before it became wholly a country road. Ruined sepulchres on either side stood regular and imposing, like street-liners for a procession. Here and there a man looking not much better than a vagabond would importune them to stop and descend some dank, dark, subterranean steps to view a catacomb, but the duchess and others had warned Hervey and Peto very emphatically that banditi would fall on them with the utmost savagery if they did, and so Hervey had resolved to come another time, in greater company, to explore these holy vaults. Where they did stop, at Peto’s wish as much as his own, was the tiny church of Domine Quo Vadis. Indeed, so compelling was it, the turning of history in the turning of a single man upon this spot, that to have passed without a prayer, at least, would have seemed to them both a blasphemy. And Commodore Laughton Peto, for all his hardening years aboard men-of-war, stood awed and speechless at the spot for several minutes, half expecting some command or apparition in the silence of the empty Roman plain.
Their carriage was a more compact affair than they would have had in England, resembling a small hard-roofed landau. Although it was well sprung even by English standards, the carefully dressed stones that had once afforded the legions rapid marching between Rome and Capua were now worn, uneven and broken, so that at times the carriage’s progress was bone-jangling and noisy to the point where talk gave way to near-shouting. But when they were a dozen leagues from the city, the road acquired a surface less cruel; thus conversation was resumed for an hour or so, before a halt for a collazione of spigola brought that very hour from the blue Tyrrhenian which had been in and out of sight for the last dozen miles. And the rough white wine of the hostaria’s own vineyard, much stronger than either Hervey or Peto had expected, soon induced slumber even as the carriage picked up into a good trot with the new horses. They dozed for a long while in the growing heat of the afternoon.
The carriage stopped suddenly. Both men awoke abruptly to shouting, angry and insistent. Hervey, now fully alert to danger, reached for the cavalry pistol on the seat by his side. In an instant its muzzle was roofwards, his thumb on the hammer ready to cock – he had primed it as they passed through the city walls – and with his left hand he pulled out his watch, as he did instinctively at any alarm. Four o’clock: they could be anywhere.
Peto, sitting opposite, facing forward, was likewise ready for action at the offside. ‘What are they saying?’
‘I can’t tell. Not a word.’ Hervey crouched by the open window to see where the shouting came from.
‘Do we get down?’
‘We’re safer inside, I think. The driver may make a bolt for it any second.’
But the driver had no such thoughts. Hervey saw him and the guard climb down from the box and raise their hands. Before he could even think what to do next, the doors were wrenched open, and big, bearded men crowded both sides of the carriage. They wore brown cloaks, despite the heat of the afternoon, and tall pointed hats with ribbons round the peaks: red, blue, black – fire, smoke, charcoal. ‘Carbonari?’ he asked defiantly.
‘Si, signori. Scendete, per favore.’
They were courteous enough, thought Hervey. And, curiously, they did not appear to be armed. But he was not minded to threaten his pistol. He motioned to Peto to do nothing but alight.
‘Austrienni?’ said the biggest of the Carbonari, taller by several inches, and easily in excess of six feet.
It was a strange thing to enquire of a man’s nationality before robbing him, thought Hervey. ‘Inglesi.’
The big man seemed impressed, but then sceptical. ‘Avete dei documenti per provarlo?’
Peto looked puzzled, but Hervey thought he caught the intention.
‘Siamo officiers inglesi.’
The big man
seemed puzzled by the admixture of French.
‘Caballeria,’ Hervey explained, pointing at himself, hoping the Spanish would be near enough. ‘E marinare,’ he added, pointing at Peto.
The big man turned and gave what was obviously an order to another behind him. Hervey now saw the butt of a musket sticking out of the bottom of the man’s cloak. He glanced at the others: it was the same with them. These were cool fellows, indeed, not at all anxious to be off with their booty.
Still the big man looked wary of the two travellers. ‘Non avete documenti?’
But Hervey could only shrug. Then a woman with fierce black eyes pushed her way to the front, her dress as gaudy as the men’s was plain, with red, blue and black ribbons tied around her waist. ‘Parlez-vous français, monsieur?’ she asked brusquely.
Hervey sighed to himself, no little relieved at being in a position to communicate at last. ‘Oui, madame. Nous sommes officiers anglais.’ He went on to explain their exact qualifications, taking care not to give any impression that his commission was sold a year ago.
The woman relayed all this to the big man, who relaxed visibly, smiled almost. He asked her several things, some of which she seemed to answer of her own accord, others which she repeated to Hervey in French. The big man wanted to know why they were travelling this route: it was not the usual one to Naples. Hervey said he didn’t know, that the driver was charged with taking them to that city, where his companion’s ship lay at anchor.
Only as he said it did Hervey realize he was upping the ransom price which these brigands might have in mind, for that could be their only object if they were not simply to take all the travellers’ possessions and make off. Yet something in the big man’s manner made him less menacing than he ought to have been. Not once had they threatened violence, nor even revealed their arms.
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